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Greg Kot picks the year's top albums -- so far

We're at the halfway point of 2012, as good a time as any to check up on the year's best music so far. I'm not making any claims about where the following albums will end up on my year-end list, but at the moment I can't get enough of them. Time tends to even things out, but a good sign for the enduring value of any music in my private play list is that it keeps yielding new surprises with each listen.

That's definitely the case with El-P's "Cancer 4 Cure," which sounds more and more like the album that is most in tune with the (disorienting) time in which we live. Ditto for Japandroids' "Celebration Rock," which suggests that the glorious, desperate din of the best '80s indie-rock -- from Husker Du to Mission of Burma -- still can resonate, especially when the melodies are this good. And just this week, I've been playing the Ty Segall Band's "Slaughterhouse" to death; it's sounding like it's going to bum-rush the top 10 before the year winds down. Here are my favorites from the year's first half: -- Greg Kot